đ€„ Faked Up #7
YouTube goes Birdwatching | America's collateral damage | There are no AI candidates
Happy Wednesday.
Faked Up #7 is brought to you by tortoise lies and sloppily stolen satire. The newsletter is a ~7-minute read and contains 65 links.
Top Stories
YOUTUBE GOES BIRDWATCHING
I was probably the Google employee who tweeted the most about Birdwatch1, Xâs 3-year-old feature that appends crowdsourced corrections to tweets. So Iâm not going to lie, Iâm a little peeved that YouTube waited for my departure to copy the feature and launch Viewer Notes.
But this is not about me. This is about YouTube users who, according to the companyâs mocks, will NO LONGER BE MISLED ABOUT GIANT TORTOISES!
Just kidding, this is obviously part of YouTube's strategy to prepare for the US 2024 election following its partial rollback of election denialism policies.
YouTubeâs Notes are remarkably similar to Xâs, all the way down to a âbridging algorithmâ meant to promote helpful comments. Hopefully, YouTubeâs imitation of X will extend to making notes available in a downloadable format.
A lot of work will have to go into making these notes useful. A helpful note, YouTube writes, "cites high-quality sources." YouTube will hope its users define high quality the same way as Googleâs guidelines, but thatâs a tall order. Just yesterday a preprint dropped analyzing the sources used in Birdwatch. Turns out the single most cited source isâŠTwitter.
The incentive structure will also be crucial. X's notes have been largely driven by counterpartisans eager to correct their ideological adversaries. Unless YouTube does something dramatically different, I expect this will happen in Viewer Notes too.
Still, itâs a worthwhile experiment that Iâll be following closely.
